History

Albuquerque in 1931 was a growing city at the center of the American Southwest, its growth accelerating in the 1920s with the arrival of improved highway connections and the opening of Route 66 in 1926. The route passed through Albuquerque as Central Avenue, transforming a local commercial street into a nationally significant corridor that connected the Midwest to the Pacific Coast. The building boom along Route 66 brought the latest national architectural fashions—including the Art Deco vocabulary that dominated American commercial construction in the late 1920s and early 1930s—to cities and towns along the route that would otherwise have been too remote to participate in the mainstream of American design culture.

A.W. Boehning’s design for the Skinner Building brought the Zigzag Moderne vocabulary of the East Coast and Midwest to Central Avenue in its full ornamental ambition. The white terra cotta tile facades, fluted towers, ornamental grillwork, and stained glass are the canonical elements of the Zigzag Moderne substyle that dominated Art Deco commercial architecture in America from about 1925 to 1933, derived from the geometric abstraction of the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes that gave the Art Deco style its name.

The NRHP listing in 1980 was an early recognition of the building’s architectural significance, reflecting the preservation community’s interest in New Mexico’s Art Deco heritage in the context of Route 66 preservation that was developing at that time.